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Comment by BlackFly | Hacker News Reader

As opposed to cooks, who love measurements like

- a carrot - four cloves of garlic - an onion - yolk of one medium egg - salt to taste

because cooking isn't a science and precise measurements are generally worse than useless. If you spend more of your time trying to perfect the measurement instead of paying attention to the texture and flavor then you are cooking very well. People insist baking is different, but it really isn't; the margins for measurements are wide enough that with a bit of experience eying scoops of everything is an acceptable strategy. You build more experience by making a few mistakes or having someone shows you the behaviors outside the margins, but for a first time recipe, sure stick to the instructions.

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> because cooking isn't a science and precise measurements are generally worse than useless

Cooking and baking are both sciences, and have very different tolerances and methods for working with those tolerances.

As others have pointed out, baking tends to require far more precision, and the methods used are focused on precision as a result.

To your point, spending all of your time focused on precise measurements while cooking - especially with fresh ingredients - isn’t going to be as helpful as developing the underlying skills and intuitions to know how to adapt what you’re cooking to the ingredients you have on hand.

Those skills and intuitions are focused on getting a particular dish into a state that is hard to precisely measure because of the high degree of variation in ingredients (egg size, garlic freshness, how spicy are those peppers?). If we could precisely measure more aspects of the ingredients, cooking could become far more “scientific”, and indeed this is what happens in the mass production of foods in factories.

The point here is that the degree of “science” involved has more to do with the practical considerations and limits of our measuring apparatus across a diverse array of ingredients.

Baking tends to involve ingredients that can be precisely measured, and an end result that can’t be tested until the bake is done. Any baker who focuses on consistent and repeatable results knows that precision is part of the path to getting there.

There is still value in knowing how to adapt to your circumstances while baking. Precise measurements just reduce the variables that you may need to adapt on the fly.

For sure! If anyone is looking to expand on this, the book Ratio by Michael Ruhlman is a must.

It's an interesting book and definitely trains you to keep an eye on the relationships between different ingredients. And especially the continua between different foods made of the same things in different ratios.

Unfortunately a lot of the recipes in that book are not very good! When settling the ratios he prioritized small, clean numbers to make the relationships clear. But those aren't guaranteed to be an optimal recipe. It's simply more likely that the best custard for example is 28:15 or 11:5 or whatever than it is precisely 2:1. Ditto every single thing in the book.

It is a good starting point for learning how baked goods work, developing intuition for how changing ingredients influence the final product. Virtually none of them are excellent ratios though.

I agree with your points, but your conclusion is equivalent to suggesting that painting is a science because perspective is geometry. I am not denying that ingredients work in a deterministic fashion, I am suggesting that subjective aspects of the person eating the dish are the most important thing once you have a basic skill level.

>> Any baker who focuses on consistent and repeatable results knows that precision is part of the path to getting there.

I make bread. Every time I make bread that is better than my standard it's because I accidentally deviated from my standard recipe. When that happens I will sometimes make a note of what exactly I did and then try to do it again, but I never got the same results that way. In fact I never get the same results with my standard recipe either. There is always variation, even when I use the same flour from the same sack.

I don't think baking is like you say at all.

Bread making is influenced by air humidity and temperature.

Did you forget an /s at the end of your comment?

No.

OK, thanks for clarifying. In that case, I suspect you must be a mathematician.

Not sure what you mean, but no.

Oh, it's an old joke. It goes like this:

A man in a balloon realises he's lost and, spotting another man walking his dog in a field, descends to ask the dog walker for directions.

"Do you know where I am?" asks the balloon man.

"Yes" answers the dog walker. "You are in the basket of a hot air balloon, hovering a few feet over an empty field, talking to a man walking his dog".

"Ah", says the balloon man. "You must be a mathematician".

"That's right" says the dog walker. "How did you know?"

"Because" says the balloon man "you gave me an answer that is at once entirely correct and completely useless".

It absolutely is different. It may not seem so to a non baker, but regular cooking has a lot more leeway. Baking consistently requires a much finer degree of control over the variables. The difference between "a pinch of baking powder" vs "5 grams of baking powder" is entirely different. In the first case, you're left wondering why pancakes came out good last time and why are they inedible this time.

I'm no great cook or baker, but I've learned through trial and lots of error how to bake bread and a few other things. Get a scale and always convert to grams.

I disagree, as long as we're talking in ratios instead of absolute amounts. The difference between "a pinch of baking powder" vs "5 grams of baking powder" is about a factor of 20. I think the main differences between baking and other cooking are that: 1) There are often very large ratios of certain ingredients in baking which -- except for spices -- is not generally the case in other cooking; 2) You can often taste the food in an intermediate stage when cooking, and adjust the ratios -- e.g. for spices -- which is not generally as useful when baking.

Of course using a scale is a good way to keep the ratios from getting too out of wack, and I usually do it too when baking and almost never when cooking.

I bought a scale a number of years back and, yes, I pretty much universally use it for baking--it's just easier as well as being more repeatable/accurate--and rarely for other types of cooking.

scales are wonderful for measuring oil/liquid though. Putting a bowl on a scale and pouring 54 grams of olive oil is so much easier and accurate then measuring out 3 table spoons of oil

I find those sorts of measurements are less likely to be given in recipes though. I do agree that weight is generally better than volume when it's given in a recipe.

The best cake baker I know weighs her eggs and scales all other ingredients accordingly.

It is a matter of scale, it is essential to measure accurately for commercial products that do not tolerate loss of bread/pizza etc. For home baking you have many challenges, from the oven temperature (less than ideal and the dutch oven is meant to simulate commercial oven conditions and temperatures at home) to protein content of flour. I do not measure anything for baking bread or pizza because I use it as therapy not as a chore.I bake pizza with love, by taking my time and adding the best ingredients I can get, from wheat germ to best quality flour and fresh Mozzarella. The family has voted, my pizza is better than any delivery they have ordered.

Ooh I've thought about doing that. Totally makes sense since egg sizes range a bit.

And the best cake maker I know whips ingredients together by her mood, inventing cakes on a whim. The margin of error is wide enough.

This is the different kinds of cooking. I have recipes I have to follow very precisely. If I dont it basically breaks the thing being made. Other things I can vary it wildly on how I feel and the dish will come out pretty good. Confectionaries (such as cookies, pancakes, breads, etc) I have to stick very close or it will be a bad time. But something like a beef stew where I am basically blending it together I can vary a lot of items and still come out good. Now if I want exactly the same thing I had the previous time then I have to follow it closely. Some ingredients lend themselves to being measured precisely. Others like say a pound of hamburger can vary in what was in the original meat. Like a lean cut will want more oil/butter. Whereas a fatty cut probably will want less oil/butter.

Precisely. Exactly the same experience over here. I make a chili by experience and it never goes wrong, except for that one time a decade back.

I accidentally dunked my scale in the sink the other day. Luckily it's working now but it wouldn't turn on for a few days. So I was doing pancakes and couldn't precisely measure stuff and they came out terrible, like before I dialed in the precise ratios I use by weight. Scale is working again, so today they came out perfect.

Patisserie requires exact proportions.

The example you gave isn't related to patisserie.

My best crêpe recipe I have gives eggs in grams - not in numbers of whole eggs. The remainder turns into a small portion of scrambled eggs or omelette.

https://www.lemonde.fr/les-recettes-du-monde/article/2018/07...

See also the "Bayesian cookies": https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

> As opposed to cooks, who love measurements like

> - a carrot - four cloves of garlic - an onion - yolk of one medium egg - salt to taste

Cooking is very much more forgiving than baking.

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